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Cover: Edward Hopper, Automat (detail) 1927 Cover text: Stress, anxiety, depression: the new science of evolutionary psychology finds the roots of modern maladies in our genes Table of contents text: Cover: Is the Unabomber Right?..........62 He says the modern world is an unfulfilling, maddening place to live. The new field of evolutionary psychology believes he has a point- that we weren't cut out for high-tech life Article: The Evolution of Despair A new field of science examines the mismatch between our genetic makeup and the modern world, looking for the source of our pervasive sense of discontent ”(I ) attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved…” -THE UNABOMBER There’s a little bit of the Unabomber in most of us. We may not share his approach to airing a grievance , but the grievance itself feels familiar. In the recently released excerpts of his still unpublished 35,000-word essay, the U.S. serial bomber complains that the modern world, for all its technological marvels, can be an uncomfortable , “unfulfilling” place to live. It makes us behave in ways “remote from the natural pattern of human behavior.” Amen. VCR’s and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives, there are times when something seems deeply amiss. Whether burdened by an overwhelming flurry of daily commitments or stifled by a sense of social isolation (or, oddly, both); whether mired for hours in a sense of life’s pointlessness or beset for days by unresolved anxiety; whether deprived by long work-weeks from quality time with offspring or drowning in quantity time with them- whatever the source of stress, we at times get the feeling that modern life isn’t what we were designed for. And it isn’t. The human mind- our emotions, our wants, our needs- evolved in an environment lacking, for example, cellular phones. And , for that matter, regular phones, telegraphs and even hieroglyphs- and cars, railroads and chariots. This much is fairly obvious and, indeed, is a them going back at least to Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents. But the analysis rarely gets past the obvious; when it does, it sometimes veers toward the dubious. Freud’s ideas about the evolutionary history of our species are now considered- to put it charitably- dated. He hypothesized, for example, that our ancestors lived in a “primal horde” run by an autocratic male until one day a bunch of his sons rose up, murdered him and ate his flesh- a rebellion that not only miraculously inaugurated religion but somehow left a residue of guilt in all subsequent descendants, including us. Any questions? A small but growing group of scholars- evolutionary psychologists- are trying to do better. With a method less fanciful than Freud’s , they’re beginning to sketch the contours of the human mind as designed by natural selection. Some of them even anticipate the coming of a field called “mismatch theory,” which would study maladies resulting from contrasts between the modern environment and the “ancestral environment,” the one we were designed for. There’s no shortage of such maladies to study. Rates of depression have been doubling in some industrial countries roughly every 10 years. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among young adults in North America, after car wrecks. Fifteen percent of Americans have had a clinical anxiety disorder. And, pathological, even murderous alienation is a hallmark of our time. In that sense, the Unabomber is Exhibit A in his own argument. Evolutionary psychology is a long way from explaining all this with precision, but it is already shedding enough light to challenge some conventional wisdom. It suggests, for example, that the conservative nostalgia for the nuclear family of the 1950s is in some ways misguided- that the household of Ozzie and Harriet is hardly a “natural” and healthful living arrangement, especially for wives. Moreover, the bygone American life-styles that do look fairly natural in the light of evolutionary psychology appear to have been eroded largely by capitalism- another challenge to conservative orthodoxy. Perhaps the biggest surprise from evolutionary psychology is its depiction of the “animal” in us. Freud , and various thinkers since, saw “civilization” as an oppressive force that thwarts basic animal urges such as lust and aggression, transmuting them into psychopathology. But evolutionary psychology suggests that a larger threat to mental health may be the way civilization thwarts civility. There is a kinder, gentler side of human nature, and it seems increasingly to be a victim of repression. The exact series of social contexts that shaped the human mind over the past couple of million years is, of course, lost in the mists of prehistory. In trying to reconstruct the “ancestral environment,” evolutionary psychologists analyze the nearest approximations available- the sort of technologically primitive societies that the Unabomber extols. The most prized examples are the various hunter-gatherer societies that anthropologists have studied this century, such as the Ainu of Japan, the !Kung San of southern Africa and the Ache of South America. Also valuable are societies with primitive agriculture in the few cases where- as with some Yanomamo villages in Venezuela- they lack the contaminating contact with moderners that reduces the anthropological value of some hunter-gatherer societies. None of these societies is Nirvana. Indeed, the anthropological record provides little support for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s notion of the “noble savage” and rather more for Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that life for our distant ancestors was “nasty, brutish, and short.” The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has written of his first encounter with the Yanomamo: “The excitement of meeting my first Indians was almost unbearable as I duck-waddled through the low passage into the village clearing.” Then “I looked up and gasped when I saw a dozen burly, naked, filthy, hideous men staring at us down the shafts of their drawn arrows!” It turned out that Chagnon “had arrived after a serious fight. Seven women had been abducted the day before by a neighboring group, and the local men and their guests had just that morning recovered five of them in a brutal club fight.” The men were vigilantly awaiting retaliation when Chagnon popped in for a chat. In addition to the unsettling threat of mano-a-mano violence, the ancestral environment featured periodic starvation, incurable disease and the prospect of being eaten by a beast. Such inconveniences of primitive life have recently been used to dismiss the Unabomber’s agenda. The historian of science Daniel Kevles, writing in the New Yorker, observes how coarse the “preindustrial past” looks, once “stripped of the gauzy romanticism of myth.” Regarding the Unabomber’s apparent aim of reversing technological history and somehow transporting our species back toward a more primitive age, Kevles declares, “Most of us don’t want to live in a society like that.” Quite so. Though evolutionary psychologists would love somehow to visit the ancestral environment, few would buy a one-way ticket. Still, to say we wouldn’t want to live in our primitive past is not to say we can’t learn from it. It is, after all, the world in which our currently malfunctioning minds were designed to work like a Swiss watch. And so to say we’ll decline the Unabomber’s invitation somehow to turn the tide of technological history isn’t to say technology doesn’t have its dark side. We don’t have to slavishly emulate, say, America’s Old Order Amish, who use no cars, electricity, or alcohol; but we can profitably ask why it is that they suffer depression at less than one-fifth the rate of people in nearby Baltimore. The barbaric violence Chagnon documented is in some ways misleading. Though strife does pervade primitive societies, much of the striving is subtler than a club fight. Our ancestors, it seems, competed for mates with guile and hard work. They competed for social status with combative wordplay and social politicking. And this competition, however subtle, had Darwinian consequences. Anthropologists have shown, for example, that hunter-gatherer males successful in status competition have better luck in mating and thus getting genes into the next generation And getting genes into the next generation was, for better or worse, the criterion by which the human mind was designed. Mental traits conducive to genetic proliferation are the traits that survived. They are what constitute our minds today; they are us, we are designed to steer genes through a technologically primitive social structure. The good news is that doing this job entailed some quite pleasant feelings. Because social cooperation improves the chances of survival, natural selection imbued our minds with an infrastructure for friendship, including affection, gratitude and trust. (In technical terms, this is the machinery for “reciprocal altruism.”) And the fact that offspring carry our genes into posterity accounts for the immense joy of parental love. Still, there is always a flip side. People have enemies- social rivals- as well as friends, feel resentful as well as grateful, feel nervously suspicious as well as Trusting. Their children, being genetic conduits, can make them inordinately proud but also inordinately disappointed, angry or anxious. People feel the thrill of victory but also the agony of defeat, not to mention pregame jitters. According to evolutionary psychology, such unpleasant feelings are with us today because they helped our ancestors get genes into the next generation. Anxiety goaded them into keeping their children out of harm’s way or adding to food stocks even amid plenty. Sadness or dejection- after a high-profile social failure, say- led to soul-searching that might discourage repeating the behavior that led to the failure. (“Maybe flirting with the wives of men larger than me isn’t a good idea.”) The past usefulness of unpleasant feelings is the reason periodic unhappiness is a natural condition, found in every culture, impossible to escape. What isn’t natural is going crazy- for sadness to linger on into debilitating depression, for anxiety to grow chronic and paralyzing. These are largely diseases of modernity. When researchers examined rural villagers in Samoa, they discovered what were by Western standards extraordinarily low levels of cotisol, a biochemical by-product of anxiety. And when a Western anthropologist tried to study depression among the Kaluli of New Guinea, he couldn’t find any. One thing that helps turn the perfectly natural feeling of sadness or dejection into the pathology known as depression is social isolation. Today a quarter of American households consist of a single person. That’s up from 8% in 1940- and, apparently, from roughly zero in the ancestral environment. Hunter-gatherer societies, for all their diversity, typically feature intimacy and stability; people live in close contact with roughly the same array of several dozen friends and relatives for decades. They may move to another village, but usually either to join a new family network (as upon marriage) or to return to an old one (as upon separation). The evolutionary psychologists John Tooby and Leda Cosmides see in the mammoth popularity of the TV show Cheers during the 1980s a visceral yearning for the world of our ancestors- a place where life brought regular, random encounters with friends, and not just occasional, carefully scheduled lunches with them; where grievances there were usually heard in short order and tensions thus resolved. As anyone who has lived in a small town can attest, social intimacy comes at the price of privacy; everybody knows your business. And that’s true in spades when next-door neighbors live not in brick-veneer homes but in thatched huts. Still, social transparency has its virtues. The anthropologist Phillip Walker has studied the bones of more than 5,000 children from hundreds of preindustrial cultures, dating back to 4,000 B. C. He has yet to find the scattered bone bruises that are the skeletal hallmarks of “battered child syndrome.” In some modern societies, Walker estimates, such bruises would be found on more than 1 in 20 children who die between the ages of one and four. Walker accounts for this contrast with several factors, including a grim reminder of Hobbesian barbarism: unwanted children in primitive societies were often killed at birth, rather than resented and brutalized for years. But another factor, he believes, is the public nature of primitive child rearing, notably the watchful eye of a child’s aunts, uncles, grandparents or friends. In the ancestral environment, there was little mystery about what went on behind closed doors, because there weren’t any. ETC. (easy to see how I made the connection, isn’t it?) |